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Dungrange

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  1. That's up to you. If you need 100' to model it to scale and you only have 15' then you need to define the least interesting 85% to cut out.
  2. At least Paddington could be fitted in a smaller space. An eight foot wide baseboard to model everything between Eastbourne Terrace and the canal and it would only need to be 18 foot long to capture everything between Praed Street and Bishop's Bridge Road. Obviously there would need to be a fiddle yard as well, but at least a model of Paddington would be smaller than Salisbury, even if I don't think it would be that interesting to operate and too much of the track would be hidden by the overall roof.
  3. Which of course adds substantially to the cost of building such a large station (and the time taken to build it). Which obviously raises the question - why Salisbury? Unless @Peak is a music mogul with a very large property and a few million in the bank, bits of the prototype will have to be missed out. Defining the appeal of Salisbury would help to determine where the compromises should be made.
  4. It depends on the direction you're looking. 😀 If this were to be an exhibition layout, then given the curve through the station, I'd be tempted to model it with the Cathedral being behind the viewer, the station at the front of the layout and the Traction Motive Depot to the rear. However, if this was to be a permanent 'home' layout constructed around the walls of a barn, then I'd exaggerate the natural curve such that it could be bent round the walls, in which case the operator and viewer would be inside the curve. In that case, the station would be behind the TMD and the Cathedral behind that. As you note, if the cathedral were close to the station, it would be a massive building with the spires reaching to the ceiling of an average room. Thankfully it's far enough away that a bit of forced perspective would permit something smaller to be painted on the backscene. I'm not all that convinced that it's particularly prominent from railway infrastructure anyway. Looking at Google Streetview there always seem to be a building or tree blocking sight of the Cathedral.
  5. Finescale Figures (now no longer trading) produced one, but I have noticed what appears to be some of their former figures in the Scale 3D range. @Skinnylinny painted one of these, which you can see in his layout thread.
  6. Indeed - even ignoring the length required, if you were to model the current Salisbury station with the Traction Motive Depot behind it, then you'd need a six foot wide baseboard and that wouldn't even allow for anything beyond the railway fence. If you want to include the car parking in front of the station building, then the baseboard needs to be widened to seven feet. Good luck stretching over a baseboard that is that wide.
  7. 1/76th of the actual size. The obvious question is how much of it do you want to model? If you were to take the A36 Wilton Road as one end of the scenic section and the A36 Churchill Way as the other end, then that seems to be about 2.5 km. In 00, you would therefore need almost 33 metres (108 feet) just for the scenic part of your layout. You'd probably need a 6m (20 foot) fiddle yard at either end. It's obviously doable if you're Pete Waterman and have a crew of Railnuts to help you. But if you're asking such basic questions, I would suggest that you need to curb your ambitions and think about much smaller and more compact locations.
  8. I dare say they could, but it might be more appropriate to ask them directly.
  9. You don't 'fit' sound to a 'chip'. You buy either a sound decoder or a non-sound decoder. The former will generally be ~$60 - $70 more expensive than the latter. If you buy a non-sound decoder now and then want to upgrade to sound, you need to remove the non-sound decoder and replace it with a new sound decoder. It will therefore be more expensive if you adopt an incremental approach. If you ultimately want sound, go for sound from the outset. Motor control is not usually counted as a function (although function only decoders don't have motor control). Similarly, sounds aren't counted as functions when looking at a decoder specification. The sound project will assign various sounds to various F keys, but a two function sound decoder isn't limited to two sounds. The number of functions in the specification is physical functions, such as lights, smoke units, etc. Unsurprisingly, the eight pin interface has eight pins. These should be connections to the track (Red/Black - pins 4 & 8) and connections to the motor (Orange/Grey - pins 1 & 5). Of the other four pins, Blue (pin 7) is a common for all physical functions. The other three wires would be your functions, which are normally, White - Front light (F0) - pin 6, Yellow - Rear light (F0) - pin 2 and Green (F1) - pin 3. Therefore you can't physically get more than three functions on an 8-pin decoder if you are looking for 'plug and play'. However, as has been highlighted, you can get decoders with more functions, it's just that these will come with a 'flying' wire, which you will need to solder to the appropriate thing you want to control, such as a smoke generator. What you do need to make sure of is that the decoder you choose has sufficient power on the functions to control what you want. Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) don't consume much power, but a smoke unit may, in which case if it draws say 250mA, then you need to make sure that the decoder you choose can supply that power to the function wires. Some may be limited to say 100mA, in which case they would be no use for a smoke unit that requires 250mA. So to summarise: Motor and Sounds don't need function wires. Headlights, tail lights, cab lights, firebox flicker, smoke generator, etc will each require a separate function, if you plan to be able to control them separately.
  10. Same here. The rest of the website seems to work - just not the railway pages.
  11. They appear to have a Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100091651800767 They posted a list of products ad prices last summer.
  12. I seem to recall that it was more than patent infringement: more a case of creating a clone and badging it as their own, including copying bugs in the original decoder.
  13. Accurascale provided an answer to that back on page 32.
  14. Have you filled in an Expression of Interest? Your wish won't come true if you don't.
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